


it begins in a garden

by JulisCaesar



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, jewish interpretation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 13:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19746691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulisCaesar/pseuds/JulisCaesar
Summary: not that garden





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ellimac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellimac/gifts).



> Statements of religious truth in the fic are not meant to represent my personal beliefs so much as an exploration of what a Jewish Good Omens would look (somewhat) like. With that in mind, Judaism is an immensely varied religion with very little set in stone about the afterlife and the apocalypse, so just because I say it doesn't mean that it's common belief (or, indeed, that anyone believes it). But I am Jewish, and I write this from a place of, uh, friendly argument.

It begins in a garden.

Not that garden.

This one: It is someone else's front garden, and there are low brick walls around it, and a wrought-iron gate. Someone has filled half of it with potted plants that are doing their very best to ignore the London rain, and the other half has a vine-covered trellis and a wooden bench.

A man is sitting on the bench, ignoring the rain with considerably more success than the plants[1], and staring at a basket between his feet. He is too old for youth discounts and too young for senior ones, and looks like you thought rock stars would look like, if you then crossed that with a used car salesman. The basket is woven and contains, under a layer of plaid blanket and still-clean nappies, a sleeping infant.

_Well_ , the man thinks _, at least they listened on the matter of 'it's more evil to make me change the bugger than it is to leave him sitting in it'._

They hadn't listened on much else.

Another man pokes his head over the gate. _He_ looks like if Elton John was a librarian, and, without missing a beat, says, "Dear me, I don't think this is your garden. Are you lost?"

* * *

[1] He is ignoring the rain so successfully that it declines to land on him and instead slinks mournfully down the back of the unresistant trellis.

* * *

Really, in order to understand this garden, you have to understand that one.

It went a little differently here.

God doesn't play dice with the universe—God plays dice with _many_ universes, and in this one the garden is almost, but not entirely, the same as the one with the apple. This garden has many trees, two of them very special, and is overflowing with wildlife, angels, the corporeality of the Divine, two humans and one lizard[1]. The lizard talks to the woman, the woman takes the fruit, this is all very familiar.

This bit also is the same, that the Divine speaks a fate for the man and the woman, and, as for the serpent in that other garden, the lizard. In the other garden the serpent was legless already and so the fate was a bit redundant[2], but here it was a shock. The lizard crawled off and contemplated pain.

To the woman God gave childbirth, and to the man God gave farming, and because these weren't expected blessings, they went away thinking they were curses.

If there had been any humans left to see, the book would have been written very differently.

In _this_ garden, God faced the angelic host, saying: _There now, isn't that nice? The children all grown up and off to make names for themselves._

And the angels said, _What_?

* * *

[1] Actually many lizards. If this took place after the invention of a distinction between lower case and capital letters, he would be a Lizard, and if Plato knew him, he would be the Platonic ideal of a lizard. Neither is true, so he is just a lizard. An ordinary little fellow.

[2] This happened from time to time. God has always tended toward forgetfulness.

* * *

Without derailing too far into metaphysics, which isn't even very interesting for the physicists, there are some things you need to know about angels:

1\. They are very good at love.

2\. They are very bad at complexity.

3\. They have a tendency to take things at face value—which would be easier if they didn't all have more than one face.

Most of the host, then, accepts that when the Divine says that the pain of childbirth is a gift, it is a sample of ineffable wisdom and not, say, an awful cosmic joke. Most of the host sets about to tidying the garden and preparing it for its next role in the plan. Most of the host, quite frankly, has the individual personality and intelligence of a small spaniel.

But out in the vastness, one heavenly body examines the garden and finds the other face. It is hard for a body who has never known balance to understand why the greatest act of love should be the most painful. It is much easier for this body, who sees the garden only at those nasty little in-between times[1], to draw the incorrect but appealing conclusion that as humans made one incorrect choice and were punished for it, so too should they be punished for other incorrect choices. This body seeks out other bodies, and draws them to it, and descends to the firmament.

No one has ever asked the Divine if this was also part of the plan.

The host, which has only just wrapped its collective mind around the idea of change as an abstract, now has to confront it as an actual and does not do so very well.

And one small entity asks a question that will end up shaping really quite a lot.

_Wait—do we also have free will?_

* * *

[1] For an angel. In-betweens are lovely and, perhaps, the best of all times, but subtlety is not much of an angelic forte.

* * *

Six thousand years pass.

It is 2008 and Crowley, who has had considerable success with never reporting to Hell if he could get away with it and sometimes if he couldn't, is sitting in a complete stranger's garden with a baby basket. An equally complete stranger—probably, but not definitely, not the one who owns the garden—is hanging over the gate and saying something completely meaningless.

"Say that again?" he says, and looks up from the basket for the first time.

Crowley has been aware for centuries that humans don't like his eyes very much. Since being discorporeated wasn't as fun as all that, he tends to keep his covered with sunglasses[1], but he had taken them off to look at the baby.

The stranger, for his part, has found that if you just think firmly enough about it, humans won't look at your eyes. Crowley, being somewhat more than human, bypasses this bit of firm thinking and looks directly into—stars.

It is _exactly_ like Falling, except in reverse, and he remembers what it was like Before, and how they sang to each other the hymns of praise, and how the expanse swirled around them, and it _was_ them, and it was good.

Crowley says " _Fuck"_ rather louder than he'd intended to.

The angel gives him a _very_ nasty look. "If this isn't your garden, you'd best leave."

Crowley has a strong suspicion that there was supposed to be a 'young man' in that sentence somewhere, but the angel had no doubt realized the same thing about Crowley as Crowley had about him, and now they are both aware the game was significantly shifted.

See, Crowley is not nearly as stupid as he pretends to be[2], and some time around the invention of writing he became aware that, instead of the previous regular rotation of angels sent to practice Doing Good Works, there was one constant angelic presence. Oh, sure, the odd angel did come down and get involved, speak to mortals, that sort of thing. But by and large, the bulk of miracles were being authorized by one specific entity.

Crowley immediately fled to southern Africa, where he spent a century encouraging the adoption of cattle as a form of currency and thus destabilizing the egalitarian hunter-gatherer system in favour of a patriarchal pastoral one, and waited for the angel to catch up to him. He was a bit of a runt of a demon, by Hellish standards, in that he had lost the draw on the only major temptation he'd ever been close to[3], and as a result been seconded to just about anything until he finally accumulated enough minor enemies to be exiled to Earth. At any rate, he wasn't keen on whatever the angel was planning on, and spent the next several centuries deliberately avoiding it, before deciding that if the angel hadn't found him by now, there was probably a reason for that and giving up on the whole incognito business[4].

All of which is to say that for a significant length of time, they two have been on the firmament together in a state of mutually assured ignorance.

Crowley stands, unfolding his legs (he has never gotten the hang of joints) and taking up the basket. "Yeah, no, yeah, I'll just be, I'll just be going then."

Angels have glorious, long titles that all come out to things like _Principality of the Eastern Wind in Early Morning_ and it's all very poetic and soft. This one is probably the _Virtue of Hanging Over Garden Gates And Looking Fabulous_ , or some such. Demons have short, nasty little military ranks. Crowley is a _milites_ , a foot-soldier. If the angel decides that demons in London are a complication it doesn't need, that'll be that for Crowley.

He's got a little more pride than to flop over and show his belly, though, so he leans on the garden gate and looks at the angel. "Say, is it yours?"

The angel looks at him back, probably for longer than necessary. "Is what? Oh, my, I _am_ blocking your way out. I do apologize, my dear!" Stepping to the side, the angel holds the gate open for him.

It's all very baffling. "The garden," he says, with the vague hope that maybe the angel will just let him go and not ask about the baby. It's really pressingly important that the angel doesn't think to ask about the baby.

Only, a second after the word leaves his mouth, he connects stars with a _garden_ and says, entirely against his will, "You were there!"

The angel, unfortunately, doesn't take long to understand. "I say, there's really no call to be bringing up ancient history like that. I really didn't mean to lose the thing, after all, and it is intentions that matter in the end."

"Is it?" Crowley says, distracted in spite of himself. Demons don't like talking philosophy with Crowley; they tend to walk away with the uncomfortable impression he didn't Fall for the same reasons they did. He takes the opportunity to sidle through the gate and set the basket behind him on the pavement. He doesn't remember whatever it is that the angel lost, but then, at the time he was rather busy sulking over the missed opportunity.

The angel opens its mouth, takes a deep breath—and then forcibly chuckles, wagging one finger. "Ah, ah, you shan't tempt me so easily! What's that you have there? Are you stealing children now?"

Crowley hasn't ever _stolen_ children, although he will take credit for the fantasy that children do get stolen in the night and replaced by lumps of wood. "I was given him," he says which is strictly true.

"By whom?"

This isn't a conversation Crowley particularly wants to have a) here b) with an angel or c) ever. "Who do you _think_?" he hisses. "Who do you _think_ would give a demon a child?"

The angel's eyes sharpen, less in them of stars and more of the mountains now. "Perhaps this is a conversation we should have someplace else."

"Perhaps this is a conversation we shouldn't have at _all_ ," Crowley snarls as the angel begins herding him down the street. He scoops the basket up before it can occur to the angel to take it from him.

"Have you been to Hyde Park?" the angel says airily.

Crowley blinks, several times, the membrane sliding across his eyes without obscuring his vision. "What? Yes! I _live_ here, angel!"

"Aziraphale," the angel says. "And good. I thought we could go feed the ducks."

Twenty-four hours ago, Crowley would have thought nothing of going to feed the ducks. It's something he does periodically, just to keep his hand in. Now, though, he has an appointment with a hospital coming up quickly, and he left the Bentley parked...somewhere.

The angel— _Aziraphale_ , the burning one, and wasn't that interesting? Usually it was his lot that were burning—doesn't give him the chance to slip away, and Crowley would rather play along and see what happens than force a confrontation.

Crowley has spent a lot of time this generation at Hyde Park, and the ducks flee the moment he steps up to the water's edge.

"Well now," Aziraphale says, "that's a welcome."

Crowley grunts and puts the basket down. The baby looks up at him, wide-eyed and silent. It's been silent the whole time, actually, which stinks of the supernatural and therefore isn't, really, a surprise.

Aziraphale pulls a loaf of bread from his jacket and begins tearing pieces off it. "So. This is it. The child."

Crowley _really_ doesn't want to talk about it. "Bread's bad for them, you know."

"What?" Aziraphale says, looking at him with big, confused eyes. "It's not for the _child_. I'm sure it's too young for solid food."

He's not sure about that, but the opportunity to needle an angel is far too good to pass up. "The ducks. It's bad for the ducks. Makes their feathers all weird."

Aziraphale holds the loaf in front of him, visibly betrayed.

Crowley steals it, pulls off the end, and throws it at the nearest duck. It splashes and the duck tears off into the sky, quacking obscenities.

Aziraphale looks outraged. "You _just said-"_

"Demon," Crowley says with a shrug. It's weird. It shouldn't be this easy to tease an angel, to fall into conversation with one, to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. And yet, here he is.

"The _child_ ," Aziraphale says emphatically. "You're sure it's-"

"The Antichrist," Crowley says, at the same time as Aziraphale says, "The Messiah?"

* * *

[1] Something that became massively more convenient after they were invented.

[2] Generally he pretends to be somewhat more stupid than any demon in the near vicinity in an attempt to not get chosen for the task, except for when 'the task' is code for 'weeding out the most useless demons' in which case he is absolutely, precisely average intelligence in every way.

[3] On the whole he's rather happy about that, since Hastur lost his legs and, well, at the time Crowley didn't have any legs to lose.

[4] He was never very good at it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no, I don't know when chapter 3 is coming. this happens as I am inspired.

Crowley, who is taking the approach that if he doesn’t think about the conversation, it hasn’t happened, leaves the baby with the angel. Aziraphale is constitutionally incapable of harming a child, probably, and this particular child is almost certainly incapable of being harmed.

At any rate, he needs a moment to think without being interrupted by an angel with the complete works of European prophecies at his mental fingertips, and also away from, what he very badly hopes is, the pervading emotional influence of the anti-Christ. Or the Messiah. Whichever one it is.

 _Something_ got its hooks into him, because he has no other respectable explanation for why he stood around for two hours while a Principality explained to him that the child was not the anti-Christ and bringer of the last conflict, but the Messiah and bringer of the great peace. It’s enough to make a good demon scream.

Crowley has never been a good demon.

Since Hyde Park is infested by angels, he drives to Downing Street and settles in to loiter. It’s been a while since he’s done a good spot of loitering, but he hasn’t lost his touch: Inside of ten minutes, five gentlemen in black suits have come over to make sure he knows where he’s going, i.e. away from here, preferably at speed.

Eventually his innate presence [1] convinces them that he is supposed to be there [2] and Crowley can loiter undisturbed.

Loitering, at its heart, is about being where one isn’t supposed to be and getting away with it. Crowley, who was supposed to be in Heaven, has been practicing loitering for six thousand years now and is quite accomplished at it, managing to balance the fiddly details of both being out of place enough to leave people feeling discomforted, yet not so out of place that they hassle you about it, and simultaneously without spending so much energy on the matter that you don’t have the concentration to do whatever it is you really want to do.

In Crowley’s case, this is sulk, and he also does it extremely well.

He is sulking about the things the angel had said, and in particular the facts that (1) the angel had been so _convincing_ about them, (2) there is no good way for him to verify the information about the Divine Plan and (3) it seems the angel is in possession of several books on infant care and thus has dispossessed Crowley of the one and only demonic assignment he has ever properly received and not sidled up and vaguely co-opted.

This last is particularly galling and occupies most of the day.

In retrospect, he would have done better to worry more about the first two.

* * *

[1] Despite his best efforts, people generally assume that Crowley is a down-at-his-heels actor in need of a job and possibly a square meal.

[2] Well, not entirely. It wouldn’t do for him to _entirely_ convince them. The gentlemen in black suits spend an afternoon wondering why no one else has politely encouraged the unemployed artist to find somewhere else to look moodily into the middle distance.

* * *

There is a children’s game called telephone, and it works somewhat like this: Everyone is gathered into the room by the child with the strongest personality and/or richest parent and directed to sit in a circle. This is inevitably followed by a small scuffle over the matter of who does and does not have cooties and therefore can or cannot sit next to each other, and also because Mike threw mud at Lucy the day before, Lucy tries to put herself to Mike’s right so she can give him exactly the wrong thing to say and Mike is trying to stay away from her, and it all takes about fifteen minutes before everyone is both in the room and seated.

Then the domineering child turns to the child to their left and whispers a phrase, which is when everyone attempts to cheat and listen in, with or without success. The purpose of the game is to send the phrase around the circle and see what comes out at the other end. Whether the goal is to come up with exactly the same phrase or something hilariously different is unclear; usually the children are split down the middle.

So imagine this game, except instead of children, you have angels and demons and the occasional human, and instead of a phrase you have the Divine Plan [1], and you might begin to understand why Crowley was so disconcerted to hear that the infant he had been handed was not, after all, the anti-Christ, destroyer of worlds and devouter of souls, but the Messiah. It’s somewhat of a relief to find out immediately afterward that Aziraphale is as confused as he is why the child should have been given to a demon, of all things, but Aziraphale, unlike Crowley, is not much prone to questioning orders.

It is just possible that, if the plan said that there should be an all-powerful infant to end the world, bring about the Apocalypse, and generally dispense judgment, then a group of ex-angels with no reason to think fondly of the Divine would interpret that as a source of chaos and evil.

Crowley loiters more intensely while trying to cope with this adjustment in his worldview.

It shouldn’t really be such a surprise that the Christians have got it wrong—they are so _particular_ about their beliefs and that whole one-from-three thing that Crowley has never understood—except that they are also very, very emphatic about everything and so somehow he finds himself agreeing with them [2]. He remembers the nice young man from Nazareth, of course, yet when he thinks about it, there was nothing that made the man, well...a Messiah. He had been polite and stubborn, and very kind, but the acts he had done were variously exaggerated, possible for any sufficiently determined human, or angelic miracle [3]. So it seems the angel is correct, or at least not _in_ correct.

Crowley kicks the closest door in order to leave a visible presence of his feelings, and gets in the Bentley to take a turn around London and see if matters make more sense that way [4].

* * *

[1] Instead of Mike and Lucy, you have Michael and Lucifer. It’s a similar relationship.

[2] Contrary to appearances, Crowley likes to agree with people. It makes them feel like he is a pleasant and helpful person, while he really is draining petrol from their car and tying their shoelaces together.

[3] The reason demons only tempted Jesus in the desert was that any time he was around humans, one or more of them was actually an angel in disguise, trying to help out. This didn’t always work as expected: See the incident with the loaves and the fishes, where he was actually trying to teach everyone to fish as per the proverb.

[4] He had parked the Bentley over in Soho. One of the Bentley’s particular talents is to be wherever he needed it, which it usually accomplishes by discreetly rolling in and sitting on a double yellow line.

* * *

Matters did not make more sense.

Crowley has felt, erroneously, that he _understands_ things.

The universe is huge and improbable and unfair. Every so often a collected dollop of unfairness splatters all over the nearest victim and things go horribly wrong [1], and that is just the way things worked. The point of Hell is to punish demons for being so careless as to get kicked out, and the point of demons is to try and tempt humans into doing something worthy of being sent to Hell; none of this makes any sense given the whole omnipotent, omnipresent shtick, but that is how the universe is. Eventually there will be so much tempting and general nastiness that Himself would send up His son to finish the matter and lead them to take over Heaven, and that will be that.

Only, according to the angel and also to Crowley’s long suppressed angelic memories, this is complete rot. Absolute codswallop. A load of rubbish.

Crowley leans on the horn at a mother trying to get all three of her children on the same side of the street at once, in the hopes of provoking her into something interesting. Annoyingly, she doesn’t even look at him, but went on herding preteens, and that is when Crowley had the thought.

He quite regularly has discomforting thoughts that would get him kicked out of Heaven all over again, if it only wasn’t far too late for that. But most of them are in the same mode—why is the Divine silent, why don’t angels do more, what if I just do a runner and spend the rest of the century on Mars, that sort of thing.

This one is something else.

It went like this: _Why do you tempt people? What if you stopped? What if, actually, the problem wasn’t asking questions after all, but rather being the sort of angel to think it rather funny if a woman has a hissy fit because you made all of the labels in the store two sizes larger?_

And then: _What if Hell was created by demons, and not the Divine at all? What if the job you’ve been doing for the last six thousand years was invented by the higher-ups you’ve always hated as a way to keep everyone from tearing them apart out of boredom?_

The problem with these thoughts is they make Crowley second-guess quite a lot of behaviours. They also sound like the angel.

He goes back to the bookshop to have a few words.

* * *

[1] Falling from Heaven is his foremost example of this.


End file.
